Read on Twitter
A story about Follower counts and the Orange Fool...
1/ I have 159,000 followers. This isn’t because I’ve ever done anything particularly important in the world, and it’s certainly not because I’m full of profound insights on this service.
1/ I have 159,000 followers. This isn’t because I’ve ever done anything particularly important in the world, and it’s certainly not because I’m full of profound insights on this service.
2/ Somewhere in the early days of Twitter a Product Manager sorted out that one key to better retention was getting new users to follow accounts of interest to them on day one. But the world was without shape, and Twitter had no machine learning.
3/ So, without a clever algorithm to make personalized recommendations, Twitter shipped a human curated “Suggested User List” of a handful of accounts and presented these to new users, just after signup.
4/ Sometime not long after, another Product Manager decided that a nice improvement would be to organize a larger set of Suggested Users into groups. In this way new users could select from accounts in categories like “Sports” “News” “Technology” or “Arts”
5/ One of these categories was “Business” and for reasons known only to our hypothetical Product Manager, my account (I am neither notable in business nor particularly good at Twitter) was placed among the half dozen accounts in the business category. Thank you privilege.
6/ It was a strange decision that persisted for years and years. Way beyond the point in fact where Twitter had much more sophisticated mechanisms for suggesting users on a personalized basis.
7/ It was in this way that I amassed my 150,000 low-intent, low engagement followers. If I had to guess, I’d say the vast majority of them are no longer active on Twitter. So here I am, the beneficiary of social proof I did not earn; a bully pulpit for an audience of none.
8/ My presence on the list was always an odd mystery. To be one of the 6-7 people that Twitter noted for their “business” acumen was a comical read of my competency.
9/ 
I don’t recall the full list of 6 accounts, but I can tell you that I am among the 5 from the list who are not President of the United States today
I don’t recall the full list of 6 accounts, but I can tell you that I am among the 5 from the list who are not President of the United States today
10/ I’m looking forward to the inevitable purge. Both the day my follower count drops to earth when inert accounts are vanquished from Twitter and the day when we toss the other “Business” fraud from office.
